Wednesday, January 23, 2008

My husband brought home a Sunset magazine from work. It had a recipe for nachos. I'm so weak when it comes to nachos or chips and salsa. We have nacho nights sometimes. They're fun. We usually get beer and sit at the coffee table in front of the TV. Well, I liked this recipe because it's different from the cheese, chili, guacamole, sour cream, etc. toppings on it. The meat sauce from the magazine used chile verde, Mexican chorizo, and minced steak. It's really supposed to be topped with black beans as well but I don't care for them so I didn't make it. I did top it with guacamole though. And I added chopped tomatoes on there to give it more color.

Oh, I made the lemongrass coconut soup like I said I would. I thought that it came out pretty good. Next time I will add more spiciness though. I didn't make the spicy noodle. A colleague from work lent me Anne of Green Gables and I just couldn't stop watching! It was so good! I love the speech Miss Stacy gives the class. If only teaching is as easy as taking the students out to look at a bird nest...

Sunday, January 20, 2008

I have been craving for Thai food again. On Thursday, I made pad thai using the Thai Kitchen brand. I never used this brand before until I got a Thai cookbook (called Simply Thai) and wanted to make green curry. I was going all over the place looking for green curry paste. I always passed by the Thai Kitchen brand because it just looked cheesy... You know... Not authentic. But because of my craving, I bought it and made the green curry with eggplant. That's how they make it at one of my favorite Thai places: Saladang in Pasadena. Anyways, it was so good! I made it again another time; and again tonight. It turned out that my sister makes them, too. But she said that she makes it with chicken and potatoes. And she cooks all the ingredients first and then mixes it with the curry. So I tried that today. It came out pretty good. The color... Not so much. I think cooking the eggplant ahead of time may have been a bad idea because the dark purple color kinda made the curry unpleasantly dark. I like serving the curry in the fondue set. It makes it more special.So what was I talking about? Oh, the pad thai. It came out pretty good. I think next time I need to drain out the juice from the shrimp and chicken that I added to the noodle. It make the noodle kinda mushy. Also, I would squeeze some lime juice on it and some extra spiciness. The Thai Kitchen pad thai sauce just needed that punch in flavor. I wish I took a photo of it!

Well, tomorrow, I'm going to use the leftover rice noodles and make Spicy Thai Noodles and the Chicken Coconut Soup from the Simply Thai cookbook. I'm hoping that by looking at the ingredients for the Spicy Thai Noodle that it is the recipe for pad kee mao. It's my husband's favorite Thai noodle dish. The best place that makes this is Thai Basil in Fullerton. It's our other favorite Thai place. We compare all Thai places in the Bay Area to this one. Each time we're in town, we try to go. It's always good there. The last time we went was for New Year's Eve. We tried a new dish with eggplant, tofu, and basil. It was so good!! We also had their coconut soup. It was very yummy. We have been really into the coconut soup. I love the lemongrass flavor in it. So that's why I'm going to make it tomorrow.

Oh my... I haven't blogged since September?! That's so bad. I've been taking photos of this and that to put up on here, but just never really had the time or got too lazy to. I even started a little crafty project for fun. I started making Christmas ornaments out of felt. Never finished them, but that's okay. I'll put them up on here another day.

I went back home for Thanksgiving. We had our usual family dinner with the traditional turkey and the fixings, plus the Japanese dishes. We always invite our family friends. It was weird because one of us "kids" actually had their first child. Anyways, I don't have any photos of the food we had that night. We always get too busy. But we were able to take a photo of our Black Friday Sushi and Tempura Dinner we had. It was my sister and her husband's idea. It was a lot of work. We were doing all we can until our mom came home to do her magic and get the dinner prepared and completed. It was a scary night for us. Not because of the amount of food, but because our dad got lymph-node infection during the middle of dinner. It looked like his left cheek fell down to his neck. He's fine. Just needed to take antibiotics.

Then, for Christmas, I actually went gambling at Pechanga with my parents. It was fun and weird at the same time. I was sitting in the back seat of the car with my parents driving. I felt like such a little girl. Anyways, we had our Christmas family dinner on the 29th because that's when everyone was able to get together. We did a tempura dinner that night. We all decided that tempura dinners aren't such a good idea because it got cold. It's better to do warm dishes with tempura as one of them. Not ALL tempura. We even tried tempura-ing (my sister's new word) avocados. Someone recommended it. It wasn't that great. We also bacon-wrapped some asparagus and tempura-ed those, too. Those were better. But I'm too lazy to do that again. Plus, the asparagus were expensive. Then, we did our Secret Santa thing. It was so much fun. My Secret Santa turned out to be my dad. He got me the water boiling thermos thingy. I still don't know what they're called. I love it. Makes me drink more tea instead of soda. It's healthier.